Thought-provoking

“Each day, we make the same choice hundreds of times: whether to lie or tell the truth. It often happens without thinking, and we ignore the profound impact of these seemingly inconsequential decisions. Even the smallest lies can cost you money, impact your relationships, and affect your choices. Conversely, honesty offers many surprising psychological benefits. Here’s how truth and lies affect your brain and your life every day.” What Lying Actually Does to Your Brain and Body Every Day – Life Hacker

“In the abstract, sure, having a gun could make me safer. Being able to shoot does even out whatever physical disadvantage I could have against an attacker. But in the real world, it doesn’t work that way. In the real world, guns don’t equalize power; they give more power to those who already have it. In the real world, there are variables. There’s a lot of guesswork to defending yourself. And frequently, those who are most in danger of violence are the least able to use guns to their advantage, because their attackers are already close to them, already familiar, already more likely to instigate gun violence and better able to rationalize using it.” Guns an equalizer? – The Phoenix and the Olive Branch

“So if I crap on Jonny’s spelling, I’m either reinforcing an oppressive status quo, or picking on a person with a disability, or both. And taking part in these kinds of insults, even when they’re directed at an Internet troll, encourages other people to participate in this kind of shaming. It’s frankly also pretty ineffective as a debate tactic. I’m not going to change Jonny’s mind, nor help him improve his writing abilities, by making fun of him. He may be a jerk because he’s never learned how to express himself in a healthy way, and I’m not doing much to help him. And reducing my arguments to the level of ad homonym attacks debases my own credibility – because if I have a valid point to make, I should be able to make it without resorting to pettiness. Furthermore, it is guaranteed that somewhere out there on the Interwebs, there is someone I agree with whose reasoned arguments are disparaged, dismissed or ignored because they come wrapped in a package of nonstandard language.” Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammer on the Internet – Painting the Grey Area

Religion

“The defense Christians often give to this argument is that God couldn’t intervene because he gave man free will. But couldn’t God have allowed the shooter to enter the school with guns but jammed all of them so that he couldn’t harm anyone? Couldn’t God have saved the children through any means that didn’t involve changing the motivations of the shooter?
If the answer is “no,” then you forfeit all right to claim that this same God “protects” or “saves” lives in any other situation (like car crashes, drownings, heart attacks, etc). God either does or does not have the power to protect the innocent. And saying that “his ways are beyond your understanding” is the mother of all cop-outs.” Why Religious Explanations of the Newtown Shooting Fail – Friendly Atheist

“People are also far from being as free in an undetermined way as we would like to think when we want to blame them. It is very tempting to want to demonize them as knowingly and willfully being causers of harm. Thinking about them as confused by misconceptions of the good (both in general and for themselves) takes some of the sting out of our righteous anger. Confused people seem less capable of responsibility in some way.
But we can hold confused people responsible and we can reason with them to help them see and stop the harm they do, and people can change. But part of getting all this to happen entails, empathetically engaging with their own view of the world and not attributing to them a malice or absolute unbounded freedom of will, neither of which they really have.” Don’t Demonize Religious People’s Motives, Focus On Their Objective Harms (Tip 6 of 10 For Reaching Out to Religious Believers) – Camels With Hammers

Equality

“The thing feminism thinks is bad is the hundreds of years of sexism part, as well as the existence of sexism today. Sexism is the problem — sexism that a lot of men engage in and a lot of women internalize.
Men engage in sexism because they’ve been taught to behave/think that way. Women internalize it for the same reason.
Feminism asks both men and women to critically think about those normalized behavior and its impact, and holds people accountable to sexist thinking and behavior even if they didn’t initially realize it was sexist.
So yes, it’s natural to get defensive when someone brings up feminist issues because it’s likely you never thought you were doing anything wrong. Does that make sexist behavior acceptable? No.
That’s why we need to do a better job as a society to teach people how to treat each other with equity. That’s what feminism is trying to do here.” 5 Reasons Why So Many People Believe Feminism Hates Men and Why They’re Not True – Everyday Feminism

“Yes, straight men find women attractive and yes, the way we look can cause desire, but this is where the commenter’s logic falls short. He wrote, “Girls look at guys who are attractive in the same manner, the only difference is that they ‘hoot and holler’ to themselves.” That’s exactly correct, we keep it to ourselves, and so do most men! You are the weak ones, you are the ones who cannot manage your own desire or control your impulses. You are the ones who would rather blame tight pants than own up to the insecurities that cause you to feel the need to vent your desire to the world. Lust is natural, cat-calling is not.” Lust Is Not Uncontrollable – Role / Reboot

“The paper offers some hints as to why women who could outearn their husbands choose not to work at all, or to work less. For instance, norms affect the division of household chores, but economically in the wrong direction. If a husband earns less than his wife, she might rightfully expect him to take on some additional responsibilities at home. In reality, however, if she earns more, she spends more time taking care of the household and their children than otherwise similar women in comparable families, who earn less than the husband. One wonders whether such women feel compelled to soothe their husbands’ unease at earning less.” Gender roles: When women dare to outearn men – The Economist

Inspirational

“We’re afraid, and so we do some rather brilliant things to avoid the thing we’re afraid of.
If we’re afraid of failing as a writer, teacher, language learner, runner, weight lifter, guitar player, manager, leader, mom … we create all kinds of unconscious strategies to avoid that failure. We aren’t “sabotaging” ourselves … we’re trying to help ourselves not do something we’re afraid will hurt us!” The Do Plan, or Why We Know But Don’t Do – Zen Habits